


a burning fist around his heart

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 02:57:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck is nine years old when his mother--his beautiful mother with her freckled skin and her sand-colored hair, who knows all kinds of funny poems and jokes and who always lets him help her in the kitchen--starts coughing.<br/>~<br/>Chuck is seventeen years old when he first meets Stacker Pentecost.<br/>He doesn't start to hate him until he realizes how much his father is starting to love him.</p>
<p>(Alternate Universe, the kaiju war never happens, but mundane life still manages to wreck the Hansens' lives.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	a burning fist around his heart

Chuck is nine years old when his mother--his beautiful mother with her freckled skin and her sand-colored hair, who knows all kinds of funny poems and jokes and who always lets him help her in the kitchen--starts coughing. His father is in the military and they live in a little house so close he can see the base, the white concrete grounds stretching off into the shimmering distance where the beige barracks rise up unevenly to the blue sky.  
She does not cough badly, at first. But it doesn't go away, and soon she starts waking him up at night with it. His father sits up with her and rubs her back, and when Chuck catches glimpses of them together in their room, his father's face looks all wrong--like it was melting. His mother looks white as chalk, and still. She gasps, and gasps, and all his father can do is hug her and rub her shoulders.  
Chuck doesn't know why he feels guilty for having seen that, but he does not sleep, those nights. He lies awake in bed, clutching sweaty handfuls of his bedsheets, listening to the low murmur of his father's voice, broken by his mother's awful, hollow coughing.

The doctors tell Chuck and his father that his mother has a disease with a name that has too many strange sounds, that her lungs are like Swiss cheese and getting worse.  
Chuck's head swims with the suppressed urge to sob; he sits in the chair, his fists in his armpits, biting his lips and alternately glaring at his knees and the doctor lady's pretty brown face.  
When she explains to them that his mother is sick because of her cigarettes--because, Chuck thinks, the smoke burned holes in her lungs--he goes white as chalk and still. The doctor lady says that, because his mom is young, she has good chances that she might be all right, if she stopped smoking. At least for a little while.  
Chuck feels sick to his stomach to think of it--his mother, in big black sunglasses and a shimmery yellow dress, blazing down the highway in their old-fashioned convertible, with the top down, wind whipping her hair back. She always lets him ride in the passenger seat as long as he promises to keep his arms in.  
In every memory he has of her, she has a cigarette between her lips, or between her first two fingers. He'd thought it made her look like a movie star.  
Now it just makes him feel sick.

Chuck is fourteen years old when he comes home from school and finds his father rushing through the house, folding his mother's clothes into a suitcase.  
He drops his backpack and cannot speak.  
His father, without looking at him, tells him to help him pack a hospital bag for his mother.  
He wants to ask where she is, but the words stick in his throat.  
He goes into the kitchen, instead, and makes a batch of her favorite sandwiches to bring to her, telling himself his eyes are watering because of the onion slices he puts on top of the hamburger patties and cheese.  
His mother gasps herself to death. He does not see her go.  
Long months later, he comes home from school one afternoon, and finds his father in his parents' room, sitting on her side of the bed, his head in his hands. The man doesn't look up as Chuck walks into the room and just stands there, looking around, wanting only to ask where she is. 

Chuck is seventeen years old when he first meets Stacker Pentecost.  
He doesn't start to hate him until he realizes how much his father is starting to love him.  
How COULD he, he wants to ask his father, how COULD he just exhange someone else for his mother?  
And Stacker is--Stacker is stern, but kind; firm, but willing to guide. He doesn't try to be buddy-buddy with Chuck, doesn't insult him with childish nicknames, doesn't ask him to call him dad or uncle or anything. He also doesn't try to lord it over Chuck, something he doesn't even think to be grateful for, at first.  
Chuck calls Stacker by first name (when his father's not around) and Mr. Pentecost (when his father is around.)  
When Chuck thinks about him, Stacker reminds him of old, strong trees in a high wind, the sound whipping past them but the trees remaining unbent.  
His father sits him down and explains everything to him, and then HE has to explain to his father (with barely-concealed rage and contempt) that he's not mad that his father likes both men and women--why the hell would HE be mad that his father likes men?  
Herc Hansen has never been one for subtleties, and he just stares at Chuck blankly for a moment before it clicks. Then he leans over and hugs him and apologizes into Chuck's hair, and Chuck feels some of his resentment wash away.  
Only some of it.  
He can't believe his own father didn't notice that about him--his own son!--even after all those years.  
And he doesn't explain that he feels like his father is trying to tamp his mother's memory down, to bury it someplace far away, and that Stacker Pentecost, the handsome retired commander with the unbelievably suave and very British personality, with his perfect, brilliant Japanese daughter; Stacker Pentecost, with his steel-gray BMW roadster and his closet full of expensive tailored suits with labels in languages Chuck can't even pronounce--Stacker Pentecost is the perfect thing, the perfect antidote for a bad memory of lost love.  
He closes a burning fist around his mother's memory, in his heart, and he tells himself he will never let it go. Part of him refuses to acknowledge Stacker as his second father, ever.  
A month after Stacker and his father get married, and two weeks before he turns eighteen, Stacker offers to teach him to drive, and hands him the keys to the roadster. Chuck tells himself his eyes are watering because of how dusty the air is, but Stacker doesn't say anything. He puts his hands on Chuck's shoulders and smiles down at him, and Chuck realizes, with a shock, that he UNDERSTANDS--that he HAS understood, the entire time. He feels humble and so, so stupid.  
The burning fist in his chest unclenches.

Chuck is nineteen, sitting in another hospital waiting room, wishing to god he'd used his brain like his (okay, he's done teasing her and calling her names) step-sister Mako, and brought something to read.  
But he looks over at her and sees she's been staring at the same page of her book for the past twenty minutes. He elbows her gently and thinks of messing up her hair to distract her; he knows she worries, all the time, about everything.  
She looks up at him, frowns, and actually remembers to turn the page.  
Herc is jogging his leg, trying to play it cool and failing. Chuck knows him like the inside of a glove, his every action telling him a story, but he's liking the way it's going less and less.  
He starts to wonder what his fathers haven't told him.  
Stacker is sitting beside Herc, ploughing through a magazine crossword puzzle with his customary stoicism. They don't say two words to one another, but occasionally they will shift and Stacker will put his hand on Herc's arm, or his knee, and once they looked over at each other and Chuck couldn't see his Herc's face, but Stacker had an expression of such perfect tenderness on his that Chuck feels guilty for having snatched a glimpse of it for himself.  
Then the doctor comes out and nods at Stacker, and tells them another disease name. This one has too many syllables, too--this one ending in -oma rather than -ema, and Chuck is old enough to understand, this time, what is happening.  
Mako looks stricken and sick beside him.  
Both Stacker and Herc look like they've been slapped.  
Chuck just goes chalk-white, and sits very, very still.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't actually start out intending for this to be so sad.


End file.
